Mozilla’s new Santa Clara data center

Short story:

Our hosting needs are radically different than they were five years ago when I started and we had a couple racks in Sunnyvale.

We now have six data centers around the world, three of which are within fifteen miles of Mountain View and consume about 455kW of power.

We’ve reached a point where it makes more sense to look at wholesale data center space (the same sort of space that the Facebooks, the Googles & the Zyngas use).

We spent a good part of the first half of 2011 researching various locations in the area before deciding to partner with Vantage Data Centers.

Construction started about a month ago and we’re on track to start turning on services in January!

Being open

Taking inspiration from our own creative design process and even our development process, we’re going to build out this data center in a uniquely Mozilla way.

We’ll be as open as we can about the whole process. Building a data center like this is something new for Mozilla and this will give the community an opportunity to see how we do it.

Here’s why this matters. Facebook/Google – those guys’ scale only applies to 1% of the world. The number of content providers that can shut down a whole data center because it got too hot outside and not even flinch can be counted on one hand.

Our scale is much more inline with 90% of the world. We have a lot of expertise in doing scale. We have a lot of expertise in running data centers that apply to most of the world. This is where we get to share how we do it & why we do it the way we do it.

Long story:

This isn’t an mrz effort so I’m not going to talk about it here.

Instead, we’ll be talking more about this at the Project: SCL3 blog. In fact, you should go there right now!

One response

Great attitude! We are seeing more and more openness from the large corporations such as Facebook and Google when it comes to data center deployments and whatever innovation they come up with to reduce energy consumption etc.

This is great inspiration to other companies in the industry, and seeing smaller companies having the attitude of sharing their experiences is just great – so keep it up. Whether a company is building its own facility, renting wholesale space, doing regular colocation or just renting iaas/cloud servers, there is almost always valuable experiences that can save other people from a lot of unnecessary hassle.